


Brujas y Arañas

by Yossk



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Is it possible to write a story without Natasha showing up?, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Spain, apparently not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 09:38:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14078055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yossk/pseuds/Yossk
Summary: Post-Civil War, Wanda finds herself in Spain. She wanders.“Not in the Rockies, then?” She asks Natasha, as she pauses on the border between two worlds.“No,” The shadow shakes her head, “Too cold.” She laughs a little, “Too much like…”





	Brujas y Arañas

**Author's Note:**

> This is, in some ways, a continuation of Balance, but it is entirely unnecessary to have read that story to read this one. It was inspired by a throwaway line when I had to come up with somewhere for Wanda to be, and I randomly chose Spain. And then I started thinking about a visit I made to Granada and Cordoba about ten years ago. And it all kind of tumbled out from there.

Wanda wanders the streets of Granada with a purposeless born of, well, having no purpose, she supposes. _Hah_ , she thinks, _Wanda wanders._ It sounds funny. She rolls it around on her tongue, ponders how the letters might feel if they were said aloud.

The Spanish for ‘wander’ is _vagar._ She looks it up in her dictionary later, as she licks hot chocolate off a warm churro in a café opposite the cathedral. It sounds harsher, harder, doesn’t have the whimsy of the English word. Much like the Russian. _Whimsy._ That’s another good word.

The man who sits at the table next to her is not wandering. Even if she couldn’t feel the waves of irritation pouring out of his mind, she could see in the set of his shoulders and the way he glances at his watch, that he is waiting for someone, that that someone is late, and that he is not happy about it. Natasha would be proud, although that does not matter anymore.

“La cuenta, por favor.” She asks the waiter, who responds in flawless American English. It’s ironic, really, that she should be mistaken for an American tourist, when the country itself has rejected her so thoroughly.

She puts her Euros down on the table, picks the narrowest street she can find and walks, _wanders,_ down it. The shops are mainly full of tourist junk, but she browses them anyway, admiring the colours, the opulence of it all. Even in the winter, it’s a country that feeds of the sun, off the warmth of a summer’s day.

The soundscape is not quite what she had imagined it to be. Not that she’s entirely sure what that was. But it certainly wasn’t the constant whir and high-pitched vroom of mopeds rattling down the busy streets. She jumps up on to the pavement as one clatters up behind her, its occupant yelling “Perdon, señorita!” as she’d wandered ahead of it, oblivious.

…

Back at the white-washed hostel, she finds an unsigned postcard on the bed. The front is an image of the Canadian Rockies, the back, a child’s drawing. Little black-and-white stick figures, two big, two little, and a squiggle she supposes is a baby. There’s a splash of colour next to them, another figure with a mass of red hair. Wanda smiles in a sad sort of way, and tucks the postcard into her jacket.

She counts her cash as the woman in the bunk opposite smokes a cigarette and pretends to ignore her. Enough for a fortnight, as she currently goes, maybe more. She glances at the postcard again. She has to decide, now, she has to find her purpose.

Maybe tomorrow, after the Alhambra.

_Yes,_ she thinks, _the Alhambra seems like a good place to find one’s purpose._

…

Water, she likes the way it follows her as she wanders the passageways and courtyards of the ancient Moorish palace. A tinkle here, a splashing there, never stopping, always going somewhere. Even when it’s gathered still, in the channel at the bottom of a fountain or a puddle on the floor, it is part of a cycle, evaporating into the air and falling somewhere else as rain or snow. Always going somewhere.

She stops at el Patio de los Arrayanes, the still pool a perfect reflection of the palace above. It’s framed in a deliberate, intentional way, making it soar, above and below. It’s like a portal to another world, a reflection of what was, what might still be.

Wanda places her hand on a pillar, feels the time-roughened stone beneath her fingertips. If she were to concentrate, if she were alone, she could feel the echoes upon it, years of tourists and, long before that, the Moorish kings and their courts, the men and woman and children who, by all accounts, had lived here fairly peacefully before los Reyes Católicos arrived at the gates and their worlds were torn apart.

If she were to concentrate, she could do this, if she were alone. But she is not alone, and so she does not, because, unlike in the storybooks, her brand of telepathy is not entirely without trace. Still, she has an imagination, and she wonders if that is what lives beneath the pool, in its reflection of the world above. She wonders where the reflection of Sokovia lives, where she can find a version of her home where her parents and her brother still sit around the dinner table, laughing.

…

Wanda does not find her purpose in the Alhambra, she finds beauty and memories and peace, but peace does not give her purpose. So she takes the train north, and east, to Valencia, where they have a science museum that looks like a spaceship, and a park bisecting the city that used to be a river.

She likes that idea, of a people who found themselves underwater, and instead of moving off the floodplains, instead of running away to the mountains, moved the river and built themselves a haven in its place. She finds the park to be less than she had imagined, an expanse of fairly scrubby grass, squeezed between and below the main highways through the city, thick with the noise of cars and mopeds. But still, she likes the shape of it, the thought.

At night, she wanders further and further out into the suburbs, listening with her mind, absorbing the sense of the place. She reunites a woman with her handbag, and diverts a knife from a man’s throat. But she does not do it in the daytime. She does not want to court their fear.

She said, once, that she could not control their fear, only her own, but she has found that not to be the case. The fear she finds inside herself, the fear not of what might be, but what has been, and might be again if she is not very, very careful, that is difficult to tame.

And so, she thinks, she is not going to become a night-time vigilante, roaming the streets, looking for trouble. She may help when she can, but that is not to be her purpose.

She counts the Euros in her coat again. She lost a day’s funds on the train fare across the country, and so she has a little over a week remaining. A job would be the answer, but she does not speak the language well and her most valuable skill is one she is not willing to share. A man would not have this trouble, she thinks, they would find work on a farm, or a building site. And she could do that work, she knows, could raise a whole building by herself, but she does not look like she could, and so they will not let her.

She will steal, if she has to, and she will do it well. But she does not want to. That is not who she wants to be.

The other answer, the one open to woman and girls throughout time, who find themselves alone and are not allowed to work on a farm, or to build a wall. That answer, she does not contemplate.

The real answer, the real solution to this problem, would be to scrabble together the last of her funds, to leave a country so unfamiliar and travel across France and Germany and Poland towards Russia, towards the former states of the USSR. To find a city she can blend into, where she can speak, or at least learn, the language and understand the culture, where her peculiar attempts at pronunciation do not cause waiters and shopkeepers to speak to her in English.

But she does not want to.

She is not exactly sure why.

…

Luck finds her, in the end. She has not lived a lucky life, and so this is somewhat of a pleasant surprise.

On one of her night time wanderings, she surprises a mugging. She does not mean to, she just walks down the narrowest street she can find, and there it is, playing out in front of her. She looks at the pair of them for a moment, and then she raises her hand and throws the assailant against the wall from twenty feet away. She sees it in his eyes, the man having his wallet stolen, the fear. He looks at her in horror, and then he runs away.

The wallet, the item they had been fighting over, falls to the floor.

So luck, maybe, isn’t the word, but she has another wad of Euros to add to her purse. She has another fortnight.

…

She boards a train again, and heads back south, back into the heart of Andalucía. She had liked it there, liked the feel of several peoples sitting on top of each other, changing the place, and changing each other, back through time. Maybe, there is more to be found.

She passes through Jaén and Málaga and Jerez and Huelva. She tries _paella_ and _albondigas_ and _boquerones_ and _chorizo con cidre_. She drinks Sangria, but finds it too sweet and thinks that if she wants to get drunk she’d rather do it how the Sokovians do: short and sharp and all at once. In Seville, she watches Flamenco, closes her eyes and feels the beats of the dancer’s feet rattling through her soul.

It isn’t until she loops back to Córdoba that she notices the shadow. On reflection, it’s been there since Huelva, maybe Jerez. A constant, a ghost in the tapestry of minds that speak to her, always. When she thinks about it, she finds it to be familiar. A little changed by time, but the shape and the colour of it are roughly the same.

She’s not sure that she wants to talk to it, and so she lets it be, lets it sit in the darkness, behind her or above her or somewhere nearby.

But she tries not to listen too hard. She will not do that again.

…

In the Mezquita-Catedral, as she roams in the gloom of a forest of tree-like arches, in the peace and the expanse of it, she feels the shadow closing in, feels the spike of intention.

“Not in the Rockies, then?” She asks Natasha, as she pauses on the border between two worlds.

“No,” The shadow shakes her head, “Too cold.” She laughs a little, “Too much like…”

The pause is a novel in itself. _Home_ is the word she was going to use, dancing on the edge of her tongue, but it was not what she meant. Wanda can feel the shape of it in her mind (not that she was looking, she treads carefully always, but around Natasha especially). It has a different feel to ‘home’, a different smell, but she’s not sure if there’s a word to match it in any language she knows.

“Horrible isn’t it?” Natasha gestures through the archway to the Cathedral, all white and gold and soaring spires.

Wanda shakes her head, “It is not the thing itself which is horrible.” She shifts, standing with one foot either side of an invisible line, “It is this point here, where two beautiful things cannot agree on how to be beautiful.”

She looks upwards, into the light, at the soaring height of it. “I could fly in here.”

Natasha remains in the shadows, wrapped in the hush of the mosque, “You wouldn’t get very far.”

“It would be nice though, while it lasted.”

…

She leaves her shadow behind, sitting by a pillar in the gloom, eyes closed and listening to the world.

Wanda wanders the pews, looking upwards, at the white and the gold and the domes and the windows, all leading higher and higher. One thing, usurped by another. Transformed irrevocably, and yet the voice of the original remains. The peace and the understatement of the approach, it transforms what she finds inside. To Natasha, it is an affront, an interruption, a travesty. To Wanda, it is something different.

She sends a little spark of red light into the wood as she rests her hand on the pew, feels all the things that it has been. When something is destroyed, taken apart and turned into something else, we must mourn what was lost. But can we also not celebrate what had been found, what has been birthed in its place?

…

Tapas is a tradition she finds she likes. A little dish, a snack with your beer, a new surprise every time. Someone slides into the seat next to her as she sits at the bar, nursing a drink and crumbling salty cheese on her tongue.

“I’ll leave, if you want me to.” She speaks in Russian, this time, the words tripping over her tongue have a different rhythm to them.

Wanda shakes her head, “No.” and then, “Cheese? It’s very good.” She slides the little plate along the bar. She does not look because she does not need to.

Natasha takes a piece. There’s a tentativeness about her, hope and weariness and something which has made her question herself, adjust her approach to the world. She flags down a waiter, ordering a litany of dishes at a speed that makes Wanda dizzy.

“You left out the back. I wasn’t sure if you were avoiding me.”

Wanda shrugs. She had been wandering, and there is no intent in wandering. “I knew you would find me again, if you wanted to.”

Natasha switches to English now, flitting between languages until she finds the right words, the right ideas to express her meaning.

“Clint was worrying about you like a mother-hen.”

“That is sweet, but unnecessary.”

“I told him that.”

They eat _jamón serrano_ and _gambas con ajo_ and a pile of warm, soft bread. The drink beer, and speak of nothing. And then they part ways.

But there’s a tacit agreement, an implicit discussion. _We will do this again._

…

Wanda lingers in Córdoba. She has not found a purpose, but she has a friend and she has the cathedral, and that is two more things than she has had in any other place.

Natasha finds her sat on the wall by the river one day, swinging her feet over the side. She vaults up and settles beside her, almost silently.

There’s an intent, again, a purpose in her thoughts.

“What did you like to do, before…” she gestures vaguely, “all of this?”

“Before this?” Wanda moves her hand, and a droplet of water separates from the flow, rising in a perfect globe, only to drop with a splash a second later, “Before this I was not an ‘I’, I was a ‘we’”

“’You’ can be plural. English is good that way.”

She thinks about it. They ran, they stole, they laughed, they survived. What did they like to do?

“We liked to dance. And I liked to knit.”

Natasha tips her head slightly, an exaggeratedly ponderous expression, as though considering an idea which in fact she has already decided upon, “Dancing and knitting. Well, one of those I can help with.”

She vaults back over the wall, transforming into a busy young professional, out for her morning run. In the pocket of her jacket, Wanda finds another small wad of Euros.

She should feel guilty and faintly embarrassed but somehow, she does not.

…

Wanda roams the streets of Córdoba, searching.

She does not know the name of the thing she searches for, not in English and not in Spanish, not in any language that is useful right now, but she searches all the same. For a shop that will sell her needles and a wall full of coloured balls of fibre that she can run her fingers through. Sheep and alpaca and bamboo. The ghosts of matching hats and socks.

That is what she searches for.

_Haberdashery._ She finds the word in English as she browses in an internet café, turning her search digital when the physical world has failed her. She finds an establishment based in Madrid that will accept an order by post, cash stuffed into an envelope. It’s a link to the past, a rebellion against the technological age.

She is grateful for it.

…

Back by the river, the wind coasting over the surface of the water, turning her cheeks pink and her fingers numb. Wanda’s needles click and clack, the muscles moving without looking, without thinking.

She had been scared she might have forgotten, but it is a part of her, buried deep, a memory impossible to shift. Not everything changes, not always.

Socks, she had thought, to start with. Yarn the colour of the sunset and a project she can slip into her pocket. Something she can travel with.

She looks up at the sky as her fingers dip and twitch through the wool, her mind and her hands and her eyes engaged in different tasks but, somehow, working as one.

…

A hand grabs hers, just after midnight on the narrowest street she can find. Wanda allows herself to be propelled along, through alleyways and up a hill and across the river. Natasha is dressed for dancing and her heels clack loudly against the tiled pavements. Wanda wears jeans and a souvenir t-shirt she bought from an elderly lady on the beachfront in Málaga.

Salsa is wilder than she had expected, more passionate than anything she has danced before. The air smells of sweat and the sun, even though it’s nearly Christmas, and her mind melds with the tapestry of voices surrounding her. Wanda lets herself go, feels the beat in her soul, lets herself be wild. She laughs.

Its only when the grip on her hand turns vicelike that she comes back to herself, realises how far she has let her mind expand. Natasha’s eyes are wide and her face is pale.

Wanda turns, and runs.

…

Sat by the river, the sky begins to lighten, dawn breaking as it has done every other day.

A shadow comes to join her, sweat cooling on her skin.

“I’m sorry.” Wanda builds a fortress to stop her mind leaking out. She has to look, to read her eyes and her shoulders and the shape of her mouth, “I promised I wouldn’t. I—“

Natasha shakes her head, “No, that’s not what it was.” She smiles a little, like she has shared in a secret, has felt the turn of the universe, “I could feel it all, like you can. It was beautiful.” She stops for a moment, considering the words, “It scared me a little, that was all.”

They sit as the sun reaches its fingers out over the river, turning it first pink, and then glassily opaque as the shadows shorten.

“Wednesday.”

“What is happening on Wednesday?” But she knows, she can feel the shape of it.

“I have to leave. I have something to do.”

She does not ask if Wanda wants to come with her, and Wanda is not completely sure why.

She is not completely sure if she wants to.

…

In the Cathedral, the winter sun streams through a window, a shaft of light for the dust particles to dance in. Natasha enters hesitantly, running a hand along a pew, glancing upwards as if she might get lost in the height of it. The wood creaks as she sits down. It feels like a protest, a sharp affront to her presence.

She thinks about memory and transformation and dancing and the turn of the Universe. She thinks about the things she still has to do, the wrongs waiting to be corrected.

The bench lowers slightly as Wanda sits next to her.

“Where do you go, on Wednesday?”

“Lima. I have some unfinished business. Something needs to be fixed.”

Wanda thinks on that, “I will come, if you will have me.”

When Natasha leaves, snapping selfies on her cellphone like an American tourist, Wanda finds a passport and a plane ticket in the pocket of her coat.

She should feel afraid, but somehow, she does not.

…  


 

_Twelve days later and 8000 miles away…_

“Dad! There’s a postcard. I think it’s from Auntie Nat.”

Cooper’s shouting over the noise of the jigsaw, as Clint helps Lila cut shelves for her bedroom. He guides her hand across the wood, holding it steady until the two pieces separate and they can drop the discarded end to the floor with a satisfying clunk.

At the kitchen table, he reads over Cooper’s shoulder. The content is inane, sentences about sun and sand and swimming pools on the back of a photograph of a crowded beach, signed ‘Polly’. But it’s surrounded by doodles, and in the corner, in red biro, is a little witch’s hat with a little black spider on top.

“I think she’s in Lima.” Announces Cooper.

“Why do you say that?”

He points to a little blob next to the hat, a brown creature with a stripy tail, “That’s a lemur.”

Clint squints at it, turning his head to one side, “If you say so.” He looks at Lila. She shrugs.

“What’re all the dots and squiggles?”

They could just be a random pattern, the product of boredom on the beach used to decorate a postcard. Or, if you count them carefully, they could be a phone number.

Clint types it into his phone, sends a text.

_The world trembles._

Twenty minutes later he receives a reply.

_:)_  
  


 

**Author's Note:**

> The mosque-cathedral in Cordoba is a very weird place. When Cordoba was taken back from the Moors during the reconquista, they turned the mosque into a cathedral. Then, in the 16th century, they built a nave right in the middle of it. I went there on a school trip in 2008, and I've never forgotten how it made me feel.


End file.
